It is unlikely that many of the dignitaries who gathered on the White House lawn to witness the signing of the Oslo Accords on September 13, 1993 were thinking of the 4.5 million people in the Middle East most poorly served and underrepresented by that dubious agreement: the Palestinian refugees. Because of unusually bad traffic on Beirut's airport road that hot September evening, I was unable to think of anything but Palestinian refugees as I listened to the self-congratulatory speeches of Yasir Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton on the BBC. My brother-in-law was driving my husband to the airport so he could participate in a human rights conference in Cyprus. We had been living in Lebanon for just ten days, so I went along for the ride in order to see more of Beirut, my newly adopted hometown.
To avoid traffic, my brother-in-law took a detour through Bourj Al-Barajneh, where I suddenly saw the harsh realities of refugee life for the first time, just as Arafat and Rabin were signing a document that relegated millions of Palestinian refugees to a marginal sub-clause of the Oslo Accords, a document that undercut and replaced the principles of international law and the precedents of UN resolutions with Israel's sheer power (backed unconditionally by the United States) to define reality, defy justice, create facts and thus limit the options of millions of people throughout the Middle East.
We drove through Bourj al-Barajneh's crowded, garbage-strewn lanes, past cinderblock houses, open streams of sewage, old women sitting forlornly on small stools in front of their tiny homes, hoping in vain to catch an evening breeze; we passed thin young boys with the expressionless faces of weary old men pushing wooden carts offering overripe tomatoes and wilting, dirty lettuce for sale, their hair coated with dust, their shirts threadbare and their shoes in tatters. It was a scene from one of Dante's circles of hell--the circle of the forgotten and the forsaken, damned to an eternity of hopelessness, helplessness, and disenfranchisement. "Unless these accords answer the grievances of these refugees," I commented to my husband and his brother, "there will never be any peace in this region!"
To see the situation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon first-hand is to confront a human rights abuse that is obscene in its duration and appalling in its enormity: To force millions of people to forego a future, the guarantee of basic rights, identity, and hope is to subject them to a living death; it is equivalent to committing a living holocaust. Which is crueler, after all: to kill millions of people outright, or to consign them and their children to unrelieved misery as vulnerable refugees generation after generation?
Concerns about refugees' rights and the eventual political repercussions of the denial of these rights are increasingly being voiced in the US and the Middle East. In the last few months, the right of return of the Palestinian refugees, a topic scheduled for a cursory--and probably unsatisfactory--discussion in upcoming final status talks between Israel and the Palestine National Authority (PNA), has been the subject of public campaigns, petition drives, an international conference, and press briefings in Washington, DC. Although cynics may dismiss these efforts as a case of doing "too little, too late," the activism, commitment, and dedication demonstrated by activists campaigning for the right of 4.5 million Palestinian refugees to return to their homes is inspiring and qualitatively different from similar and equally crucial campaigns of recent memory, such as those to prevent house demolitions in the West Bank.
